"Bird People"
“Bird People” begins with a series of calm aerial views of human beings in transit: crossing the terminal concourse at Charles de Gaulle Airport, filing through the turnstiles at the nearby commuter rail station, dozing and daydreaming on the train. The images add up to an affecting composite picture of a familiar modern paradox. We never seem more alone, more adrift from one another, than when we are bustling along in impromptu crowds, migratory flocks of isolated souls.
The film’s attention alights on two such lonely people, whose paths cross at the airport Hilton. Gary Newman (Josh Charles) is a Silicon Valley businessman, stopping overnight for a quick meeting en route to Dubai. Audrey Camuzet (Anaïs Demoustier) is a college student (or maybe a recent college dropout) who works cleaning rooms at the hotel. Neither is entirely alone in the world — she has a nagging father on the other end of the phone, he has a wife, children and co-workers tracking his movements — but each seems to float in a bubble of alienated solitude.
Pascale Ferran, the director and co-writer (with Guillaume Bréaud) of this entrancing and surprising film, starts out by following Audrey and Gary through cycles of boredom and distraction, with some attention to the small pleasures that help relieve the anomie. Gary soothes himself with cigarettes and minibar scotch. Audrey discreetly eavesdrops on hallway conversations and darts like a hermit crab from room to room, as if briefly occupying the lives of whoever was just there.
Gary’s disaffection suddenly blooms into a crisis. He decides, impulsively but irrevocably, to walk away from his life — his job, his family, his responsibilities — and start something new. This does not go over well back home, and a series of heated phone calls and one very long, very painful video chat (between Gary and his wife, played by Radha Mitchell) suggest both the causes and the costs of his action. Ms. Ferran observes it all with tender objectivity, and Mr. Charles (known to fans of “The Good Wife” as Will Gardner) does not strain to make Gary either especially likable or overtly unsympathetic. Ms. Demoustier, for her part, hints at a complicated and volatile inner life behind Audrey’s quiet, slightly mousy appearance.
It is not inaccurate to describe “Bird People” as the story of an encounter between a drifting young woman and a man facing the confusion of impending middle age — a variation on the themes of Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation,” perhaps, though, of course, the premise could be exploited in tawdrier or more provocative ways. You may, based on this description — or during the first half of the movie — think that you know where this story is going. I guarantee that you are wrong.
There are plot twists, and then there is what Ms. Ferran does here, which is to transform — impetuously, improbably and altogether marvelously — this somber, realistic tale into something else entirely. I don’t want to say exactly what, and I’m not sure I can. But Ms. Ferran manages to find a strange and yet still completely persuasive point of contact between the literal and the magical, between the austere, responsible aesthetics of contemporary art cinema and a realm of imagination suggestive of fairy tales, Ovid’s“Metamorphoses” and the fiction of Haruki Murakami.
Let me come down to earth before I fly into a spoiler. Ms. Ferran, whose “Lady Chatterley” (2007) turned an early version of D. H. Lawrence’s barnyard bodice-ripper into a sensuous, flower-bedecked pastoral, is an audacious and idiosyncratic filmmaker with the ability to find unexpected shades of emotion in characters and places. The environs of an international airport are, almost by design, drab and soulless, but in “Bird People,” the human presence and the persistence of nature (in the shape of errant sparrows and scraps of greenery) create the potential for beauty and meaning.
Which is not to suggest that this film is a sentimental or softheaded fable. On the contrary, Ms. Ferran is attuned to the sorrow that Audrey and Gary carry with them, and also to the spiritual emptiness and the moral indifference of the world around them. (In one poignant sequence, Audrey discovers that the hotel’s dapper and confident night receptionist, played by Roschdy Zem, has no home and sleeps in his car.) Viewed from a certain angle, “Bird People” is a very sad movie. But it’s also a lark.
Comments
Post a Comment